Creating a Personalized Trade Promotion System
Health and Beauty Company Streamlines Trade Promotion Management with Custom Tool
Clarkston Consulting has developed a custom Trade Promotion Management (TPM) tool for a health and beauty company, as detailed in the "Developing a Custom TPM Tool" case study. The tool was designed to address the company's challenges with consolidating forecasted and actual sales data from multiple planners and accounts, aiming to replace a legacy, manual system prone to errors.
The development process involved several key steps:
- Understanding Client Needs and Challenges The client, producing sustainable health and beauty products, used a legacy TPM tool that required manual data consolidation from seven sales planners across multiple accounts. This was inefficient, error-prone, and limited timely insights into promotional trade spend and sales performance.
- Designing a Tailored Solution Using Excel for Flexibility Clarkston designed individual Excel-based planning documents for over 40 planning customers and 150+ products, allowing weekly forecasting at the product level. Excel was chosen for its flexibility to quickly deploy a customizable solution early in the client’s data analytics journey prior to a full TPM platform implementation.
- Automating and Error-Checking Features to Improve Data Quality To reduce duplicate forecasts and data entry errors, the tool incorporated functionality to automatically identify duplicate item forecasts within planning files. This enabled planners to quickly spot inconsistencies and ensure comprehensive and accurate forecasts.
- Integrating Actual Sales Data for Real-Time Insight The tool fetched actualized sales data for both direct and indirect customers, automating display of these figures alongside forecasted data at the item level. This real-time visibility supported better trade promotion planning and impact analysis.
- Consolidating Promotion and Terms Management Each sales planner could maintain promotional and term information linked to forecasted and actual sales data, which streamlined trade spend management with a unified dataset.
- Generating Standardized, Holistic Reports The tool produced standardized reports comparing forecasted versus actual promotional and term spend as well as product sales by customer. It also aggregated data to provide enterprise-level monthly reports, supporting budget tracking and future forecasting.
- Focusing on User Experience and Adoption The interface was designed to enhance ease of use, encouraging organizational adoption. Simplified data entry and error detection supported planners in efficiently managing complex forecasts.
This process addressed both the inefficiency of manual data handling and the lack of timely insights, ultimately improving the company’s trade promotion reporting and decision-making. The centralized information is used to track yearly budget and future forecasting. The tool allows for simple and efficient error identification in forecasting, streamlines trade promotion management, and provides reporting insight across forecasted and actualized sales, promotional spend, and term spend.
The client, a health and beauty company, needed a solution to the issue of inefficient data reporting before fully adopting a trade promotion management tool. Clarkston supported the client by using Excel to create individual planning documents for over 40 planning customers and over 150 products, centralizing this information to allow for holistic monthly reports at the retailer and enterprise level.
- Clarkston, in partnership with a health and beauty company, developed a custom Trade Promotion Management (TPM) tool to address their challenges with manual and error-prone data consolidation.
- The innovative TPM tool, designed by Clarkston, utilizes data analytics in Excel for flexible and early implementation of a custom solution within the client’s data analytics journey.
- To improve data quality, the tool automates and error-checks processes, ensuring comprehensive and accurate forecasts while reducing duplicate forecasts and data entry errors.
- The health and beauty company, now equipped with this tool, gains real-time insights by integrating actual sales data, supporting better trade promotion planning and impact analysis in the retail industry.
